Biography
Carl Sandburg was one of the most recognized members of
the Chicago Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. When Poetry,
an important magazine founded during the Renaissance, published
Sandburg's poem Chicago in 1914, he rose to celebrity
status. The poems he went on to write celebrated the working
classes of America and used simple vocabulary and everyday
speech to appeal to everyday readers. Besides being a poet
and a journalist, Sandburg was an active populist and socialist
who often expressed his political views in his verse. His
poetry collections include Chicago Poems (1914), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke
and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922).
In addition, Sandburg was an important collector of American
folklore and folk songs, which he printed in such collections
as The American Songbag (1927) and The People,
Yes (1936).
Explorations
The NAAL Sandburg selections offer a fine sampling
of his range. There are Imagist or Vorticist lines here which
suggest Pound; other lines recall William
Carlos Williams; some stanzas seem strongly Whitmanesque;
and some themes suggest the darkness of Robinson.
A very popular and valued American poet for several decades
of the twentieth century, Sandburg tried many voices and
modes in celebrating modern American experience and working
people. Was he a unique voice in his own right or a popularizer
of voices and forms which really belonged to other artists? 1. Read over the NAAL selections and comment on
Sandburg as a nature poet. Does he address nature as Whitman
does, with Whitman's Transcendentalist faith in the inherent
divinity of the natural world? Do Sandburg's city scenes
and city poems suggest that the urban landscape exists within a
larger, redemptive natural context? Or apart from and alien
to that context?
2. In these poems, Sandburg appears to favor stark contrasts
-- between the poor and the rich, the living and the dead,
the work of human beings and the work of natural or cosmic
forces. Does that delight in contrasts enrich these poems?
Does it make them predictable or schematic? Cite specific
lines and moments from these poems in framing your answer.
Other sites to consult:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/sandburg.htm:
A biography, criticism, and background information, with
an elegant interface.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=29&CFID=10178891&CFTOKEN=96327670:
A short biography of Sandburg from the Academy of American
Poets.
http://carl-sandburg.com/: A site dedicated to Sandburg’s
Chicago poems, containing a biography and discussion group.
|
